Month: July 2016

Above: The State Department of Health’s Maui District Health Office

We’ve written previously about the need for improved care home inspections and the challenges in choosing a care facility for elderly individuals.

This week brought new local developments around these issues, when news broke that the Kokua Council, one of Hawai‘i’s oldest advocacy groups for seniors, filed suit against the state government for failing to post reports of care home inspections.

A state law passed in 2013 requires the Hawai‘i Department of Health to post these reports on the Web, covering more than 1,700 facilities statewide.

The DOH has failed to meet the mandate, having only sporadically posted since the start date came and went last year. According to the Civil Beat, “the department’s request for $22,466 to hire a clerical worker to post inspection reports online was nixed from the $13 billion overall state budget.”

Another article mentions that $148,000 was initially budgeted for two clerical positions to help get the information online, “but no one was hired in the first two years, and the appropriation was not renewed in the next biennium budget.”

In their complaint, the Kokua Council is seeking to compel the State government and the DOH to comply with the law.

Care home inspection reports, according to the complaint, are “the only access to impartial information regarding the quality of a long term care facility most families will have access to.” As such, they would—if they were available—provide vital information to the many local families faced with the critical decision of placing or a loved one in a care facility.

Often, the family has mere hours to make this decision, like when transferring the person from a critical care facility to a more long-term place of care.

Another issue that Kokua seeks to litigate is the DOH’s redactions from the reports, which Kokua alleges far exceed the personal health information that must be stricken from public view.

As practitioners in the legal area of elder abuse, this is an issue close to our hearts. We would like to see the state do its duty and give Hawai‘i families access to the information they need to make a hard decision. It is public information, after all.

For its part, the state must respond to the complaint in no more than twenty days.

Above: Kim Klobuchar (D-MN), one of the four senators who introduced the Elder Abuse Prevention and Prosecution Act. Photo c/o Edward Kimmel, CC BY-SA 2.0

Last week, Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) introduced the Elder Abuse Prevention and Prosecution Act (S. 3270). The legislation was prompted by a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing held last month. The Elder Justice Coalition offered its support of the bill.  National Coordinator of the Coalition Bob Blancato said “It goes after the problem with three solutions in mind: to ensure prosecution of those perpetrating scams, improve our data collection so we better know the extent of the problem, and provide for enhanced prevention programs and activities to avert future victimization.” Read the text of the bill here and read a section-by-section summary here.

In support of federal cases involving elder justice, the bill requires the designation of “at least one Assistant United States Attorney in every judicial district to prosecute (or assist with) elder abuse cases, conduct public outreach, and ensure the collection of the statistical data on elder abuse.” It establishes an advisory working group of U.S. Attorneys who will provide advice on the DOJ’s elder abuse policies, provides training by the Attorney General for FBI agents on the investigation and prosecution of elder abuse, and creates an Elder Justice Coordinator position at the Federal Trade Commission.

Because the epidemic of elder abuse has, for the most part, raged silently so far, we need more data to be able to know how to fight it. Toward this goal, the bill requires the Attorney General to coordinate with federal, state, and local law enforcement to define the best practices for data gathering, and to provide technical assistance to law enforcement on how to enact these practices. The Department of Justice will collect and summarize all this information publicly on its website, along with additional recommendations to further improve data collection. The bill also calls for increased penalties in cases of telemarketing and email fraud targeting the elderly.

Because this bill does not make any additional budget appropriations, it can do little for victim assistance besides calling for “developing a multi-pronged approach to elder abuse and exploitation” and asking the DOJ’s Office for Victims of Crime to report to Congress on elder abuse-related issues. Still, we are glad to see that issues of elder abuse and exploitation are staying on the Congress’s radar in 2016, and we are hopeful this bill will be enacted.